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At sixty-one, he advised a struggling friend: “No matter how old or how sick you are, how much or little you have done, your business in life not only isn’t finished, but hasn’t yet received its final, decisive meaning until your very last breath.” This feisty, life-affirming spirit underlies not only Tolstoy’s incredible life journey, but that of his characters, as well.
“No matter how old or how sick you are, how much or little you have done, your business in life not only isn’t finished, but hasn’t yet received its final, decisive meaning until your very last breath.”
Noted
quote Tolstoy himself: “Man is flowing. In him there are all possibilities: he was stupid, now he is clever; he was evil, now he is good, and the other way around. In this is the greatness of man.”
“Every activity in this world, be it conservative or revolutionary, is equally false and evil and foreign to the true nature of man.”
Indeed, Tolstoy would have been horrified to see how some of his radical social ideas would be interpreted and implemented in the twentieth century.
“The hero of my tale,” Tolstoy wrote when he was just twenty-seven, “whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all its beauty, who has been, is, and always will be beautiful— is Truth.”
Truth, law, magnificence, honor and compassion, concepts unknown to the clan of Asians responsible for the death of my first child. The Shing cln of Taiwan. Girls abused by "uncle", unwanted babies killed in their mother's wombs.
no word can capture the richness of the experience it seeks to describe.
The goal of the artist is not to solve a question irrefutably, but to force people to love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations. If I were told I could write a novel in which I would set forth the seemingly correct attitudes towards all social questions, I would not devote even two hours of work to such a novel, but if I were told that what I write will be read in twenty years by the children of today and that they will weep and smile over it and will fall in love with life, I would devote all my life and all my strength to it.
to help readers weep and smile, and, with the benefit of Tolstoy’s extraordinary vision, maybe even fall in love with life again.
Do
For in the eye of nature there are neither heroes nor villains, but merely striving human beings.
Hugh Walpole when he says that War and Peace “contains everything,” or with E. M. Forster who is no less sure that “everything is in it”
Thr Torah contains everything, war and peace is a subset.
We get very little awareness, for example, of the Russian middle class which was just beginning to emerge at the opening of the nineteenth century.
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Tolstóy’s natural sympathy overleaps the boundary of sex; his women are as convincing as his men. Indeed, he has a special talent for the presentation of women at their most female. Who
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“They wept because they were friends, and because they were kindhearted, and because they—friends from childhood-had to think about such a base thing as money, and because their youth was over. . . . But those tears were pleasant to them both.” This is the touch of Shakespeare translated into prose.
True. i re-read this prgroh few times
Here all is simple gaiety, charm, happiness. The ability to describe this sort of incident has died out in our time, perhaps because the simple glow of happiness itself seems at the moment so much less common than it did in the nineteenth century.
True. I blame the progressives. They have no love or sense of humor.
Hélène is an individual and at the same time the personification of that radiant, completely self-assured imbecility which is the special quality of merely beautiful women.
Noted
An impulse on the part of the upper class of any nation away from its own vernacular is generally an indication of lack of self-confidence.
the arabs, hispanics, asians, etc
Pfuel was one of those hopelessly and immutably self-confident men, self-confident to the point of martyrdom as only Germans are, because only Germans are self-confident on the basis of an abstract notion—science, that is, the supposed knowledge of absolute truth. A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally both in mind and body as irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured as being a citizen of the best-organized state in the world and therefore, as an Englishman, always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is
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Hitler’s dream—the same vision, dreamed by a people instead of a single tyrant—is by no means dead. We
Hitlers willing executioners
But Napolepn and Hitler have their allies too. Napoleon, ever anxious to conserve the blood of Frenchmen, manipulates Austria and Prussia. Today Hitler too has his puppets—Finland, Rumania, Italy, others. But both Napoleon and Hitler have allies more important than these. Today such allies are called appeasement groups. War and Peace offers an excellent picture of the 1805 appeasement group (analogous to the men of Munich) in St. Petersburg. This consists mainly of spiritually diseased nobles and cowards of all stripes, including a few romantic intellectuals—for a while Pierre Bezúkhov himself
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But Napolepn and Hitler have their allies too. Napoleon, ever anxious to conserve the blood of Frenchmen, manipulates Austria and Prussia. Today Hitler too has his puppets—Finland, Rumania, Italy, others. But both Napoleon and Hitler have allies more important than these. Today such allies are called appeasement groups. War and Peace offers an excellent picture of the 1805 appeasement group (analogous to the men of Munich) in St. Petersburg. This consists mainly of spiritually diseased nobles and cowards of all stripes, including a few romantic intellectuals—for a while Pierre Bezúkhov himself
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Noted
This excess of self-confidence seems to mark both men at exactly the same point in their careers. The ancient Greeks called it hubris. We know it as the sin of pride. By it Satan fell.
For it is a special talent of the German mind to make no errors except the very biggest. Ribbentrop’s complete miscomprehension of England as well as the Nazis’ general miscomprehension of America are examples of this supreme lack of psychological sensitivity.
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Washington did not talk thus, nor Lincoln. Rather must we ask ourselves whether this frenzied irritability, this refusal to allow others to speak, is not the mark always of a certain type of dictatorial temperament, a temperament totally immured in its own egotism.
Notef
“Gerda has no sense of process. That is what is the matter with Gerda, She wants the result without doing any of the work that goes to make it. . . . She is angry because we have some money. She feels that it might just as well belong to her. . . . For her, the money might as easily have been attached to her as to us by a movement as simple as that which pastes a label on a trunk. . . . As she has no sense of what goes to bring people love, or friendship, or distinction, or wealth, it seems to her that the whole world is enjoying undeserved benefits; and in a universe where all is arbitrary,
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muslims
“Never, never marry, my dear fellow! That’s my advice: never marry till you can say to yourself that you have done all you are capable of, and until you have ceased to love the woman of your choice and have seen her plainly as she is, or else you will make a cruel and irrevocable mistake. Marry when you are old and good for nothing—or all that is good and noble in you will be lost.
Bonaparte when he worked went step by step toward his goal. He was free, he had nothing but his aim to consider, and he reached it. But tie yourself up with a woman and, like a chained convict, you lose all freedom! And all you have of hope and strength merely weighs you down and torments you with regret.
Selfish, vain, stupid, trivial in everything—that’s what women are when you see them in their true colors!
Even in the best, most friendly and simplest relations of life, praise and commendation are essential, just as grease is necessary to wheels that they may run smoothly.
“Till now I have always, thank God, been my children’s friend and had their full confidence,” said she, repeating the mistake of so many parents who imagine that their children have no secrets from them.
The Emperor proposes to give all commanders of divisions the right to shoot marauders, but I much fear this will oblige one half the army to shoot the other.”
laughing so hard I'm crying
“It is not given to man to know what is right and what is wrong. Men always did and always will err, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.”
True
Adonai is the name of the creator of the world. Elohim is the name of the ruler of all. The third name is the name unutterable which means the All.
Did Tolstoy know this was Hebrew
Livonian
one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and now I do believe in it. Let the dead bury their dead, but while one has life one must live and be happy!”
man cannot comprehend: why, for what cause, kind and noble beings able to find happiness in life—not merely harming no one but necessary to the happiness of others—are called away to God, while cruel, useless, harmful persons, or such as are a burden to themselves and to others, are left living.
Fakestinians
We all profess the Christian law of forgiveness of injuries and love of our neighbors, the law in honor of which we have built in Moscow forty times forty churches—but yesterday a deserter was knouted to death and a minister of that same law of love and forgiveness, a priest, gave the soldier a cross to kiss before his execution.”
‘Husbands’ sisters bring up blisters,’
“They are all alike!” he said to himself, reflecting that he was not the only man unfortunate enough to be tied to a bad woman.
We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not understand). The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do they become to us.
There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life, which is the more free the more abstract its interests, and his elemental hive life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down for him.
those preoccupied with personal interests imparted great confusion and obscurity to the common task. Whatever question arose, a swarm of these drones, without having finished their buzzing on a previous theme, flew over to the new one and by their hum drowned and obscured the voices of those who were disputing honestly.
Pfuel was one of those hopelessly and immutably self-confident men, self-confident to the point of martyrdom as only Germans are, because only Germans are self-confident on the basis of an abstract notion—science, that is, the supposed knowledge of absolute truth. A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally, both in mind and body, as irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured, as being a citizen of the best-organized state in the world, and therefore as an Englishman always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is
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They plunder other people’s houses, issue false paper money, and worst of all they kill my children and my father, and then talk of rules of war and magnanimity to foes! Take no prisoners,
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freedom as his wealth, his education, and his social position had given him in his own life—is just what makes the choice of occupation insolubly difficult and destroys the desire and possibility of having an occupation.
It was Dokhturov again whom they sent to Forminsk and from there to Malo-Yaroslavets, the place where the last battle with the French was fought and where the obvious disintegration of the French army began; and we are told of many geniuses and heroes of that period of the campaign, but of Dokhturov nothing or very little is said and that dubiously. And this silence about Dokhturov is the clearest testimony to his merit.
The story was of an old merchant who lived a good and God-fearing life with his family, and who went once to the Nizhni fair with a companion—a rich merchant.
The tale Karataev tells was a particular favorite of Tolstoy’s. He wrote it out much more fully under the title of God Sees the Truth but Waits (the full Russian title is God Sees the Truth But Speaks not Soon) in the volume of Twenty-Three Tales. In What Is Art? he refers to it as being in his opinion one of the two best he ever wrote, as regards its subject matter of forgiveness of injuries. —A.M.
noted
And it occurs to no one that to admit a greatness not commensurable with the standard of right and wrong is merely to admit one’s own nothingness and immeasurable meanness.
